> I suspect a large percentage of the poll-takers don't even know if
> their hardware is supported by one of Haiku's existing video drivers,
> and as a result were unable to make an informed choice on that
> particular question.
I think it's cheating to ignore the result telling people 'anyway, you
didn't understand the question'. A lot of people have or had problems
with video mode setting. I know my work on intel_extreme helped some of
them (including myself).
People were allowed to tell they didn't understand the question. So,
why would they have checked an answer anyway ?
We have to face it : there are some hardware problems still here, and
it's part of what prevented BeOS from being really successful back in
the last century. We have to take it into account and set up a plan of
action. Or, we may decide to ignore it anyway, but I don't think that's
a good move.
For intel_extreme and radeon the problem is not so hard to solve : the
hardware is well documented, and there's xorg code at hand for
reference. For nvidia, I don't think there are available specs (unless
I missed something), so it's a bit more difficult.
While Haiku may happen to work on your computer, I have a 0% success
rate on mine (a Dell inspiron 1525 and an IBM Thinkpad T60). Both had
problem when I got them and I had to fix the driver to get them
working. It's worth noting that a lot of other devs are using T60s and
have no problem with them. These two computers are built around the
GMA965, which is now rather old and deprecated. I think any new
computer you can buy will have unsupported video hardware. Seeing that
R1 is not happenning now, the situation will be even worse when we hit
the market. And the OS not being able to show up in the right video
mode is a good reason to not keep it around on modern flat panel
scrrens (on CRTs it was is not a problem as big).
With the specs available, and the hardware at hand, writing a driver is
not a very long task if you only do mode setting and framebuffer
access. I think we could get the hardware founded by the NPO or even
lended by users willing to get the driver done. In some cases it may
even be possible to work remotely using ssh to a user's box.
--
Adrien.